Indoor air pollution

Menu

Julia Roberts, Ambassador for Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

As the world celebrated International Women's Day, Julia Roberts, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves ambassador, spoke out on how important it is to provide millions of women in developing countries who now cook over smokey biomass and coal stoves with cleaner and more efficient home cooking technologies.

WHO is a founding member of the Global Alliance and is working to reduce the deaths and disease from unhealthy cookstove technologies, which WHO estimates to kill nearly 2 million people annually, including more than one million people, mostly women, who die from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Poor women in developing countries also devote a great deal of their time to wood/biomass fuel collection, and may often be subject to harrassment when fuel-gathering.